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Last weekend was fantastic… Earlier my mum and I decided to go, this year again, to the place my great-great grandfather and his brother (Marian and Florian Bilicki) used to make our famous and beloved Tokaj wine. Actually it was a harvest festival, as in every year, in Hungary, all the wine-producing villages and towns organize events with concerts, a procession with folk costumes, folk songs and dances etc. But before, I found out that there would be three girls from Poland to visit us that weekend who, when I asked whether they wanted to join us became so excited about it. So we decided to go together wih them. But I didn’t tell them, before the arrival, the fact that the grandfather of my grandmother and his brother, whose cellars we were visiting were also from Poland…

We were lucky to be invited by the woman who owns some of the vineyards and cellars of Florian – her kindness was endless: she offered us a walk in the yards, made us visit the old cellars and we also had the chance to taste her wine. The next day we attended a mass – such a mass I’ve never attended before, it was generally a celebration of the wine with the small church being decorated with grapes, the wines being blessed and the priest talking about the Polish-Hungarian friendship and “wine relations” 🙂 Besides this, we went to see the town of Tokaj which lies south of Abaújszántó and is maybe the most famous of all villages and towns in this region. While driving there we saw the gentle landscape all around us, with huge fields of grapevines and green hills in the far distance. After returning to Abaújszántó, however, I realized the view from there is definitely nicer than from Tokaj 🙂 At the end of the day we met a group of pilgrims who were visiting the statue of Virgin Mary that looks over and guards the vineyards, we picked the very special and very sweet grapes from which our Tokaj wines are made of.

I believe it was one of those things that make life more round and more complete… Now I feel I have a great fire in my soul, a great love towards this corner of the Earth and I have a dream to find out more about the story and spread it so that Florian’s soul could be reborn again.

Some pictures to show you what I felt there:

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“My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there”
and
“I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list”